High-school and middle-school teaching

I strongly believe that mathematics needs to be understood and experienced, rather than merely being memorised as a set of arbitrary-seeming rules that somehow turn out to produce the right answer. That is one reason why I am such a fan of tools such as Desmos and Polypad, which allow otherwise intangible concepts literally to be poked at and explored. Some of my Desmos creations are here, and a fuller collection can be found here.

In addition to hands-on activities of that sort, I have also learned in my teaching experience that many students find it helpful to be given some rules and procedures to follow in order to get started. It is crucial, though, that such rules should serve as stepping stones towards deeper and more flexible understanding, rather than as ends in themselves.

Here are the K-12 classes that I have taught so far:


University teaching

Introduction to fMRI: Imaging, Computational Analysis & Neural Representations

The core focus of this course was on how fMRI can be used to ask questions about neural representations and cognitive and perceptual information processing. There was a particular emphasis on neural decoding and multivoxel pattern analysis methods. The course was mostly intended for graduate students, but was also open to interested undergrads.

Data science formed a key component of this class: taking large, high dimensional data sets and writing code to explore the data with statistical and machine learning analyses.

Language and the Brain

This undergraduate class covered the neural processes and representations involved in language processing, and how they relate to linguistic behaviour. As part of the class, students found journal articles that they wanted to present to the class, met with me to go over their draft slides, and then gave their presentation. Practicing how to convey the key points of a topic in an engaging manner was probably as important an aspect of this class as is the actual brain and language content.